April 15, 2013

Promoted Posts : Ensuring your content stays visible

April 15, 2013

Promoted Posts : Ensuring your content stays visible

Promoted Posts : Ensuring your content stays visible

If there’s one key factor uniting businesses, it’s the desire to be seen and heard amongst the ever expanding social media landscape.Facebook posts are only seen by a portion of your audience, dependent on how many of your fans are online at the time of posting – and even then, this number is influenced by the activity on the news feeds of your fans. Facebook determines what you see using EdgeRank, an algorithm based on weight, affinity and time. It focuses on the type of content users display; how often people communicate or how often a story has been talked about. So if your fans haven’t engaged with you on Facebook – or vice versa – your posts are as good as invisible on their News Feeds.So how do you fix this, and push your content to the top?This is where Promoted Posts come into play. Not only will they reach all of your fans – they’ll reach their friends, too. Promoted posts allow your business to elevate your content higher in users' News Feeds by paying to get ahead of organic posts. Provided you have over 400 Likes, you can promote any post you share from your News Feed, profile or Page, including status updates, photos, videos, questions and offers. Unlike ads, which appear on the right hand side of the page, your Promoted Posts will appear high up in the News Feed, so their visibility is much greater. And also unlike ads, Promoted Posts are also visible to mobile users, allowing you even greater reach.To illustrate this, let’s take a look at St. John Ambulance’s clicktosave page, where we promoted a 2-for-1 First Aid Course post. On a page with just over 550 Likes, the Promoted Post achieved a boastable 164 Likes, 30 shares and most impressively, 64, 542 impressions.

St John clicktosave Promoted Post

Promoted Posts are a quick and simple way of engaging your audience – but that being said, they require careful consideration. In order to take full advantage, you should first consider the strategies and goals of your business. Your Promoted Posts should be considerate of your brand ethos, target audience and the goal itself. They also need to be well timed – if they appear too often, or too many at once, you run the risk of fans feeling spammed and Unliking your page. This is why strategy is paramount – after all, it wouldn't be worthwhile to spend valuable dollars promoting a post if your message didn't resonate with your audience.Not just for sponsoring positive news or specials, Promoted Posts can also be quickly disseminated to your audience, so if you happen to have a problem relating to your product or service, you can inform your fans quickly and avoid a potential crisis – a necessary feature when dealing with social media, where negative comments can spread like wildfire and potentially damage your brand’s reputation. This ability to be in control of how the news is spread is a great asset to any business.Talk to the team at Bang Online about how to make your business stand out amongst the Facebook crowd.